You wanted this feature for years. You understood the problem, but the amount of time that it would have taken to properly implement and test it held you back from doing it. Obviously, anyone else who wanted this feature came to the same conclusion.
This new tool reduced the amount of time that it would take. So you used the tool. You used the tool to bring the feature into existence, checked the tests, and took enough time to ensure that it was good. You didn't lie about your contribution in the PR, and the maintainer deemed it acceptable. And now everyone has this feature!
When you eat a strawberry do you feel like an impostor for not growing it yourself?
As a woodworker who owns both hand tools and power tools, I don't feel bad when I spend most of a project cutting the repetitive pieces with a motorized saw. I also don't feel like a snob because I prefer certain hand saws under certain circumstances.
To me, the metaphor is pretty solid for coding LLMs. A motorized saw, to anyone that's used them, takes away all the pain and complexity of using a hand saw for the same work, but it also introduces its own complexity and pain. There's also things that stay consistent: I still find myself transferring or measuring certain ways, I still have to brace the piece, I still need jigs (albeit different ones).
> No, but if I asked an intern to eat it for me, I wouldn't feel like I did anything at all.
That's a poor analogy.
If I asked an intern to implement a function, I know I did the instruction and that I worked through them. The intern did work, but I did fancy high level work and killed several birds with one stone.
Even better analogy: if I'm a film director, I'm working through a lot of people. The DP, the cast, the crew, the AD (though they're my boss, telling me what I can/can't budget for)...
The best analogy for AI is the "film director" analogy.
There are good directors and bad directors, good films and bad films. No director works alone (unless it's some kind of avant-garde film school project).
You wouldn't say a film director isn't doing work. That they can't be uniquely felt through their work. That what they're doing isn't hard, doesn't require talent/taste, and doesn't get better over time.
So yeah, our job that we were all interested in has transformed into a different thing (directing), which some people are also interested in, and some aren't.
There's no substantive difference between directing an intern and directing people on a movie, by the way, except the number of people. If you never aspired to direct people, it's all kind of the same, and if you actively dislike it, I imagine directing more people would probably be worse!
Directors do work, but a different kind of work. Not really what most people would consider hands-on filmmaking. They're more like managers--telling others what to do, how to light this, how to shoot that, where the characters should be. It's work but it's not "making." If I want to make a film, I'm going to grab a camera and point it at something. If I wanted to tell other people to make a film, I'd become a director.
That's the major difference I feel between writing code and having an LLM do it. We're all being asked to become directors when we just want to make movies.
Making movies is hard. Ai basically made the smaller personal sized things easy, but substantial projects are still out of reach. There isn't anything for an individual to feel good about.
We grew tomatoes last summer. Over the last 2 years, something about tomatoes (and BLTs in particular) really clicked for me; we'd grown tomatoes many previous summers, and I could give a shit, but last summer I cared a lot about our home-grown tomatoes.
And I totally did feel less good about BLTs I made with supermarket heirloom tomatoes!
It was irrational, but I did feel that way. I get where people are coming from.
It's not irrational at all! The act of doing something yourself brings inherent pleasure and satisfaction, whether that thing is "growing tomatoes" or "coding a feature". It makes us feel useful.
Cherokee Purple.
Black Krim
Black from Tula.
Brandywine
heck, Almost any black tomato is a richer flavor than traditional hybrids.
Heirloom tomatoes are also fantastic for flavors, but they are difficult to grow. Consistent watering, pruning lower leaves to keep disease away, proactive treatment of fungus and bacteria. It's a lot of work, but the results you get when it all comes together, yeah, it makes a fantastic tomato soup, sauce, Caprese salad.
I'm starting seedlings this week. I'm probably going to have more tomato seedlings than I know what to do with. Of course, as problems go, I could have worse ones. The problem I'd like to have is growing too many mini watermelons. For some reason, I just can't get any yield, and the squirrels/mice gnaw on them as soon as they are vaguely ripe.
My partner is not going to be happy when I rip up most of the lawn in the backyard. She'll probably buy me overalls and a straw hat.
"*A BLT is a tomato sandwich, seasoned with bacon.*
It wasn't until I tasted my first great tomato, at the vine-ripe old age of 22, that I finally understood the true nature of the BLT (and, by extension, why I'd never enjoyed tomatoes on my sandwiches or in my salads). Here we go: A BLT is not a well-dressed bacon sandwich. A BLT is a tomato sandwich, seasoned with bacon. From this basic premise, all else follows."
If you buy the variety most often found in American grocery stores (usually labeled as Roma tomatoes), they're terrible. Try the variety labeled as "tomatoes on the vine" (four-digit produce code 4664, which I know from memory, having punched it in to so many self-checkout scanners over the years). They're actually juicy and tasty the way tomatoes should be. Avoid Roma tomatoes, they're cardboard masquerading as a tomato.
"Globe" tomatoes are much, much more common as generics in American supermarkets. Sometimes also "Beefsteak" variety. Roma tomatoes are almost exclusively used in making sauce.
What are they called, then? Since I took a job overseas over ten years ago, I haven't been in American grocery stores much. What's the "normal" variety called? I distinctly remember Roma being the cheapest, and also worst-tasting, variety, and learned to buy the "on the vine" style instead, but those are the only two that stuck in my memory. What is the one I'm forgetting about?
I mean, I'm not much of a gardener, but Erin sure is, and I had a direct basis for comparison. Our tomatoes were better, but the supermarket heirlooms were perfectly cromulent.
I think the key is just to make sure you're buying them in season, and that they didn't travel far.
Yes. I didn't know or understand why I felt meh about run-of-the-mill raw tomatoes this until the Kenji article.
"Using mealy, off-season tomatoes is the primary unforgivable sin, but when it comes to BLT crimes, that's just the tip of the iceberg lettuce.
...
Off-season tomatoes are grown in warmer climates, picked when underripe, then treated with ethylene gas (a gas that is naturally produced by plants to trigger ripening in fruits) to produce their red color before they hit supermarket shelves. The result is tomatoes that are as bland as they are ruby-red.
Truly great tomatoes must be fully ripened on the vine, where they'll continue to develop flavor and sweetness. Look for plump tomatoes, with the heft and give of a water balloon. If you have a choice, look for substantial and meaty heirloom varieties with balanced sweetness and acidity, like Cherokee Purple or Brandywine.
Avoid tomatoes that feel light for their size, which means they have more air pockets inside and are typically better for saucing or salads."
> When you eat a strawberry do you feel like an impostor for not growing it yourself?
I don’t think this is the right question. What you posit is a consumption dilemma. It’s a valid question, but it focuses on what values we might arbitrarily ascribe to how we source what we consume.
The OPs dilemma is more akin to giving a cutting board for Christmas that you bought vs handmade. Or some other. I think these cases of how we present what it appears we created is the dilemma OP is facing.
Except, calling it a "tool" is exactly why OP feels bad. Simply phrasing it another way, I.E. "OP paid for a service to implement a feature he wanted," would completely remove the guilt and be more technically accurate.
IMO, the way we talk about using AI leads to a lot of confusion and needs to change.
if you cant lift something because its heavy, but have an exo suit that will let you lift it... does that make you feel like a fraud?
AI is like that its a tool. you;re still responsible for the use of it and the output of it. you need to understand that if you use that exo suit to hurt someone or use it poorly and damage something/someone.. thats entirely on you. just like a knife in your hand is a tool to prep food or to attack someone. your actions with it are on you.
This is a repeating phenomenon, and probably worse on land. Fitness and run tracking apps also reveal troop locations and concentrations on land (location clusters reported by apps targeted at non-local-language audiences stick out like a sore thumb).
How do you know this? It's been confirmed that you can use adb to temporarily bypass verification on a per-app basis, yes, but from what I can see, there's no indication that sideloading one app over adb will also skip the 1-day period.
This matters if you're sideloading an app store like F-Droid, because sideloaded app stores still have to go through PackageInstaller [1], which probably still enforces verification checks for adb-sideloaded apps?
I love this new information about birth rates and WFH, and totally support following it to higher birth rates.
But the article framing as if the pronatalists somehow knew of the birth rate benefit and maliciously used it to counter their stated goals is too heavy-handed.
How about framing this as the new information that it is and getting the information out there in a positive way so that it can be used in both government and corporate policy?
At the start of WFH, we were all* rather more worried about the pandemic and what the shops had in stock than childcare.
By the end of the pandemic, it was more of a social battle between those who wanted to maintain the new normal and those who absolutely loathed it, and again nobody* really cared about childcare.
Closest anyone got to caring about childcare at any point was home-schooling and the value of air filters in classrooms.
* I am of course being excessively absolutist with this language, very little is all-or-none.
Sure, but I didn't think about this specific topic in any direction until this article. That's the great thing about articles and media, they spread thoughts and connections that might not be obvious to folks who are focused on other things.
I'm thankful I live somewhere I can pay $300/month for daycare. I think it's even cheaper now and capped at like $400 no matter how many kids you have in daycare.
We tried to have them at home while WFH a few months during covid when everything was shut down. That didn't work. lol.
I don’t understand the reasoning to have children if you don’t want to spend time with them and rather would pay someone to do that for you (not addressing directly at you). Being able to spend time with your child is a gift which passes by very quickly.
Unless you're independently wealthy, even the most traditional two parent nuclear family with a married mom and dad requires at least one parent to spend a significant portion of their day away from their children earning a living. I'm not sure why you would so strongly object to both parents doing that when you would presumably not object to just one doing the same.
WFH kind of solves that. Instead of taking coffee breaks or going to lunch with the colleagues presumably one of the working spouses can spend those breaks with the family. Now, I am looking at this problem from the European perspective where one of the spouses receive childcare payments and is allowed not to go to work for 1-2 years. I know about American system (12 weeks off) and it's beyond insane to me.
I commented specifically regarding your wording about what's easier. I support the view that daycare is something you have to do reluctantly, not that it's the easy way out. Over the years I had seen too many of my colleagues who "prefer working from the office" because there are small children at home. That implies that the other spouse (every time it's the mother) who is staying at home taking care of them.
The article at least partially addressed that. The argument isn't that the pronatalists aren't truly in favor of higher birthrates, it's that they're selectively in favor of higher birthrates for certain groups of people and thus support solutions focused on those groups such as expensive fertility technology like artificial wombs while opposing more generally applicable approaches like workplace flexibility.
I think the article is on the right track, but it misses also mentioning the conservative politics angle. The right-wing version of pronatalism also includes a pretty obvious implicit, if not entirely explicit, goal to return to the 1960s model of family life where the husband worked while the wife stayed home with the kids. Offering women workplace flexibility and giving them the option to both work and have a family runs counter to that societal vision.
If the AI has to control a body to sit on a couch and play this game on a laptop that would be a step in the right direction.
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